Tophattingson
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User ID: 1078
Tophattingson
2yr ago
Some more claims I did a double-take on, having never heard them before: [...] that masks are entirely ineffective in preventing the transmission of COVID-19?
By the best standards of evidence available, masks do nothing for covid-19. https://www.cochranelibrary.com/cdsr/doi/10.1002/14651858.CD006207.pub6
Some people caveat this by saying the evidence against is weak. My response to this is that if you're going to force billions of people to do so, you should have strong evidence in favour, not weak evidence against it. The default position for medical interventions should be that they don't work until proven otherwise. Others argue against the findings on the basis that masks necessarily must work because physics, on the grounds you don't need to do a scientific study to determine if a parachute works. This is called unfalsifiability, and is the classic sign of pseudoscience. Regardless if we did do a study on parachutes and got a null result that would actually be very good evidence against parachutes.
Stuff like this means we need to caveat any claim that Kennedy has wacky beliefs / conspiracy theories with the fact that his political opponents hold the similarly wacky (but in practice far more destructive) belief / conspiracy theory that masks work for covid.
It's a bit worse than a footnote. Schooling is obligatory. You can't avoid having your children wearing a degrading symbol of submission to unjust authority (and one that increasingly looks like it harms your health) simply by not interacting with the schooling system because that is also illegal.
Further, it's part of a wider pattern that would need a whole book to comprehensively document. But to try to keep things as brief as possible, covid-sceptic backbencher MPs from the governing party repeatedly asked to be provided with cost-benefit analyses for restrictions. These were not provided, generally on the basis that it would be too complicated to provide a cost-benefit analysis (Effectively admitting they have no utilitarian justification for restrictions as they never bothered doing the work). On rare cases where cost-benefit analysis was done, such as with vaccinating children, if the numbers went against what the government wanted to do anyway the relevant institutions were overruled.
A world in which advocates of lockdowns backed them on the basis of a utilitarian calculation where personal liberties fell on the losing side looks very different than the one we actually got. For instance, by actually having an argument to present in favour of their policies, advocates of lockdowns would have spent less time and funding on slandering their opponents as substitute. I would still find them disagreeable, as abandoning personal liberties have huge second and third order effects that make the world more dangerous, but it would at least be comprehensible, and a far better debate than was actually had. However, utilitarian and cost-benefit analysis is not the argument that supporters of lockdowns advanced. Cost-benefit analysis was generally done by sceptics to try to understand or even steelman government decision making in the absence of them providing their own reasoning. That's what I did back in March-May 2020, and it was only when I realised that reasoning from the government was not forthcoming because it didn't exist that I went full anti-lockdown.
Decision-making during covid can't be comprehended through a lens of people making the least bad decisions possible. Rather, only by identifying an ideological commitment to restrictions for the sake of restrictions do the restrictions we got make any sense.
Edit for more considerations:
Regretfully committing human rights violations in a desperate effort to stop covid would resemble the ideas of proportionality such as in the Siracusa principles: Doing the absolute least violation of human rights possible to avert the bad outcome. To give examples:
The severity, duration and geographic scope of any derogation measure shall be such only as is strictly necessary to deal with the threat to the life of the nation and is proportionate to its nature and extent
And
The principle of strict necessity shall be applied in an objective manner. Each measure shall be directed to an actual, clear, present, or imminent danger and may not be imposed merely because of an apprehension of potential danger.
This is not what we saw with the response to covid in the UK. At every level restrictions that were absent any evidence of effectiveness were imposed, which immediately violates the idea of doing the least bad thing possible. Even a single restriction existing for a vapid reason like "Sturgeon did it" would sink any claim of proportionality, but the number of restrictions that fit that category are quite extensive. To list some more examples:
Reintroduction of masks in winter 2021, regarded to be Boris retaliating against the general public for the crime of noticing partygate by some of his own backbenchers.
Masks in general, considering they lacked evidence of efficacy, still lack evidence of efficacy, and thus can never be a proportional violation of civil liberties.
Matter of public record that including children in rule of six had no rationale but was done anyway. It's likely that the entire rule of six thing has no rationale - inside baseball is that it is "six" because Gove thought it sounded better for sloganing than "eight".
Lack of policy to deal with covid tests that are determined to be false-positives following a more reliable PCR test, instead continuing to make children isolate despite not having covid, because doing so would be contradicting earlier statements about whether false-positives are a thing.
General lack of evidence that outdoor spread is a significant source of covid transmission compared to indoor spread, despite restrictions excessively targetting outdoor spread and arguably encouraging indoor spread.
That vaccines don't work to prevent transmission, which was at best a wild assumption made without evidence and then used to coerce people into being vaccinated against their judgement. And then to bring in vaccine mandates.
That children are harmed less by covid but harmed more by many restrictions, repeatedly ignored, violates proportionality
Like I said, needs a book to go through all of these.
Tophattingson
2yr ago
I'd be missing the financial resources to make any meaningful contribution.
Regardless overthrowing the north korean regime is a sort of inevitable end-point of effective altruism even with a strong anti-coup bias. You eradicate malaria, you cure world hunger, you're living in a megastructure in the outer solar system... And the slave-masses of the country-sized concentration camp that is North Korea continue to scratch the dirt for a meagre near-starvation diet.
What is the net gain in QALY from switching the population of North Korea to living under the known next best alternative of South Korea. How much does each QALY then cost? Is dropping automatic weapons on North Korea the new malaria nets?
Tophattingson
2yr ago
Listing all the cases of high-profile politicians ignoring or carving out conveniently politician-shaped holes in restrictions would take a very, very long time. Via wealth, influence, the nature of their job etc, politicians could evade the worst effects of lockdowns. Taken at it's broadest, plenty of high-ranking Nazis did in fact subject themselves to the concentration camp. They just subjected themselves to it in a very different way than prisoners experienced.
Further, from information that has come out about decision-making over time, we know that many decisions were taken very lightly and for very frivolous reasons. For instance, it's a matter of public record at this point that the reason the UK government mandated face masks in secondary schools in England is because Nicola Sturgeon did it. This is not the behaviour of someone who is deeply concerned about violating personal liberties but believes via some utilitarian calculation that doing so is the least bad option.
Tophattingson
2yr ago
Unless someone is suggesting that committing genocide makes it impossible to simultaneously drink alcohol and play the accordion, I'm not sure how those photos would constitute evidence against the allegations.
Tophattingson
2yr ago
Presumably there are places in the world where young boys are still committing holocausts. Xi's regime surely will have some Eichmann-type functionaries choosing where the camps in Xinjiang are built and how many they should detain. Problem is, show them the film, and you'll likely get the same excuses that the PRC uses for doing it in the first place. And probably a few "how dare you compare it to the holocaust" comments alongside it.
Tophattingson
2yr ago
Yes, the general phenomenon that a large segment of the population in Nazi Germany came to support the regime for one reason or another. I'm not sure we really disagree?
Tophattingson
2yr ago
A comparison has plenty of merit. They have both shared features and differences. That's what a comparison is.
Tophattingson
2yr ago
The review of the film in question is linking it to Nazi Germany as a whole, not Eichmann specifically.
Tophattingson
2yr ago
I don't think that's the point of banality of evil as given in Eichmann in Jerusalem. Instead, I thought it was about the lack of clear evil intentions. This would also apply to an armed robber unthinkingly killing a clerk because they happened to be in the way of their actual goal of committing a robbery. Now, maybe because the goal is still a robbery they have an evil intent, so this isn't the best example. However, in most cases, unthinkingly committing evil acts because not doing so is an obstacle to your goals tends to get called evil without the banal qualifier.
Eichmann's actions were not ordinary or boring. He was not some random low-level bureaucrat unthinkingly crunching numbers or a labourer loading Zyklon B. His position was fairly high-up, including his involvement in the Wannsee Conference.
Tophattingson
2yr ago
Remember that time they gassed the antivaxxers?
No. However, in the US, as a consequence of regime propaganda, a large proportion of the population eventually claimed to support the idea of putting unvaccinated people in concentration camps. Are these people evil? Banally evil?
The idea that nothing should ever be compared to the Holocaust contradicts the concept of "never again", because for it to never happen again, similar events must be stopped before they progress to being as bad as the holocaust.
I think only in China were lockdowns severe enough to qualify as “home imprisonment”, as far I know in Western countries you were allowed to leave your house to go buy groceries, walk your dog, exercise (albeit sometimes in a reduced area), etc.
Home imprisonment often comes with reasons you are allowed to leave your home. Even prisoners placed in prisons get home leave from prisons, for instance, and nobody would deny that they're not imprisoned. The reason the definition of imprisonment needs to be so broad is because otherwise it allows situations where pseudo-imprisonments can't be challenged by their victims.
To put it another way, I know a relative who was sectioned (is it called that in the US) for two weeks and then recovered and was released. During their sectioning, they actually had more liberties than they did under lockdowns, as they were permitted to go anywhere for two hours a day for any reason, every day. Not to mention access to legal protections if there was reason to believe that the sectioning was done fraudulently.
Lockdowns were a case of curtailing personal liberties in an emergency, which does not have the same quasi-universal moral consensus as committing genocide.
Nazi Germany justified genocide on the grounds of curtailing personal liberties in an emergency. (Edit: This is not the actual reason but it's the steelman they could make. Nazi Germany didn't recognise personal liberties as a thing at all. Similarly, lockdownist regimes don't actually believe they're "curtailing personal liberties in an emergency" because they don't recognise personal liberties as a thing either. You don't see relevant leaders regretfully apologising for their crimes against human rights just before they go on to commit them, they just go unacknowledged or denied. Further, those who criticize lockdowns for being breaches of human rights do not get the response that they are a regretful breach of human rights but something something utilitarian priorities. Rather, they get called far-right extremists or conspiracy theorists, suggesting lockdownist leaders at least publicly deny that any loss of personal liberties happened at all)
Prior to 2020 there was a quasi-universal moral consensus against false imprisonment. That's why it's in the universal declaration of human rights. It's why there's objections to concentration camps. Or at least there were, until places like Australia started opening them up. Countries have been condemned, sanctioned, isolated etc for far, far less than what many places did in 2020.
Lockdowns do not reduce freedom in the name of safety because they both don't increase safety from covid and also massively increase danger from the government. I am against false imprisonment in particular. The response was empirically ineffective given that countries that declined to do lockdowns saw no ill effect from doing so. I am against all covid-related travel restrictions because governments clearly cannot be trusted with an inch lest they take a mile.
would you be against them even if it was proven beyond a shadow of a doubt that they worked?
Does this hypothetical serve a purpose? It's like asking if you'd be against the holocaust if Nazi ideology was proven to work. A world in which Nazi ideology was correct does not resemble our own in any way. For a start, there's no hypothetical way for a lockdown to pass a cost-benefit analysis because the maximum benefit is so small compared to the minimum cost. Even if our lockdowns as actually carried out worked and prevented, say... 0.6% of the population dying, the amount of time people were placed under lockdown itself undoes that through QALY losses.
Tophattingson
2yr ago
If you really want to compare someone to the least murderous Fascist dictator, then Salazar is surely the go-to? Regardless any comparing of recent US presidents to fascist dictators would inevitably run into the problem that Biden, rather than Trump, has done more of the whole purging political dissent through force thing.
Tophattingson
2yr ago
And further the reason it is linked to Nazi Germany is because such a large segment of the population, for one reason or another, eventually became supporters of the Nazi regime. Maybe not all enthusiastically so, but enough to be regarded as supporters of Nazi policy.
Opinion poll data from the immediate post-war years confirm the limited impact of Allied efforts. In October 1946, when the Nuremberg Trial ended, only 6 per cent of Germans were willing to admit that they thought it had been 'unfair', but four years later one in three took this view. That they felt this way should come as no surprise, since throughout the years 1945-49 a consistent majority of Germans believed that 'Nazism was a good idea, badly applied'. In November 1946, 37 per cent of Germans questioned in a survey of the American zone took the view that 'the extermination of the Jews and Poles and other non-Aryans was necessary for the security of Germans'.
And this is where I differ. I regard my failure to remove Xi and similar figures from power to be a vague source of guilt, only dulled by the fact that it's not even remotely possible for me to do so. If there was a way for me to meaningfully contribute towards a cause with that goal in mind, it is likely I would do so, but what few possible avenues exist to doing that seem to have exceptionally dubious connections with that end goal. E.G Liberty in North Korea exists but their actions are so tangential to the actual goal in their title that I don't know how they intend to link the two. Free Joseon? How would I even help them? It's not like crowdfunding hits on Kim Jong Un is a thing.
Tophattingson
2yr ago
Reducing the false home imprisonment of the entire population to a mere disagreement over policy preferences is like calling the subject of the film a mere policy disagreement. Maybe you do think such actions are just policy disagreements, but if so the entire point of the banality of evil as a concept starts to fall apart. They're not evil, not even banally evil, perpetrators and those who aquiesqued to the holocaust just had a civil, rational difference of opinion that by chance happens to involve imprisoning and then killing lots of Jews, with as much moral weight as preferring rye bread to bagels.
Tophattingson
2yr ago
On the contrary, the guy on the paycheck is doing it for personal gain. The alternative is to not run the diesel engines and not get the paycheck.
Tophattingson
2yr ago
Sometimes I wonder if "banality of evil" is just a way to downplay regular evil. In other circumstances, if someone commits or aquiesques to evil deeds for the sake of personal success, that just gets called evil. If an armed robber murders a clerk, they don't get the privilege of having their evil called "banal" even if it was done seeking personal gain. Perhaps confronting the alternative, that some 90% of Germans simply were evil with no qualifiers during the height of Nazi rule, is too politically awkward?
There's a certain sick irony to an article in The Guardian discussing the banality of evil after what transpired over the last few years in the UK with lockdowns. Then again, maybe banality is still the wrong word for it, given that at every turn they wanted the government to go even further, lockdown harder and for longer, and be even more aggressive towards dissenters.
Tophattingson
2yr ago
The big upending of the British legal system over the past few years has been dedicated to sending police to harass otherwise law-abiding citizens for activities such as organising a judo class for children and having a coffee while walking with a friend. It's not merely a funding thing. There are obvious incentives for police to harass the harmless rather than confront the difficult and dangerous, and the UK is already long down the road of anarcho-tyranny.
Tophattingson
2yr ago
It's a bad investment in Japan because their zoning system makes it very easy to build new houses. Indeed building new houses is a cultural norm, and houses are considered temporary occupiers of land rather than permanent features. Buy an old house? Chances are you'll knock it down and replace it.
Tophattingson
2yr ago
The broader problem is that applying woke cancellation standards evenly would mean cancelling probably 99% of the population of the big upcoming market that everyone wants to sell stuff to. Cancelling the CCP is the rock upon which the ship of cancel culture sinks, mainly for reasons of sheer impracticality.
Tophattingson
2yr ago
Inviting a supporter of the Russian regime hardly seems like the most notable complaint one could have about this convention. The more pressing problem is that it's scheduled to happen in China at all, which necessitates that all in attendance are at best ambivalent about the even fouler Chinese regime. But that matter doesn't even require vague speculation. Liu Cixin's views on Xinjiang are hardly some well-kept secret, and involve denying the Uyghur nation a right to exist, claiming they are all terrorists etc. So alongside the "actual fascist" you're also going to get the "actual communist".
Tophattingson
2yr ago
It's the surgisphere scandal. Impossible data initially taken at face value because it was politically convenient.
Tophattingson
2yr ago
Similar to how someone wearing a Swastika probably also supports the implications of that Swastika rather than merely being attracted by it's abstract windmill geometry.
In my case it's quite simple. The mainstream had the power to falsely imprison me with lockdowns and did so repeatedly through 2020 and 2021. The random shit grifters did not and largely wouldn't want to. To make things slightly less personal, the amount of damage the failings of the mainstream does is orders of magnitude greater than anything their opponents can do.
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